Simon Jenkins: Gordon Brown's statement is desperate. It is John Major-ish, a mishmash of abstractions and cobbled together statistics as if he were manager of a Stalinist collective. Thousands, millions and billions seemed to fall from the PM's lips like spittle. Nothing he says carries substance, with buzzwords such as "guarantee", "entitlement", "right" and "power" coated in splurges of "investment".

Much of this cannot be true. What is "a mandatory job for every school-leaver unemployed for a year" or "a guarantee to local people of more power to keep their neighbourhood safe" or a "guarantee of a personal tutor for every parent" or an "enforcible entitlement to see a consultant"? Such pledges cannot be fulfilled when Downing Street has no way of bringing them about, any more than Tony Blair did when struggling with his delivery unit.

The abandonment of so-called targets is equally meaningless with no indication of what is to replace them. Such is the dirigisme of Brown's Treasury that its grants to local authorities and hospitals must be related to some indicator of performance. What else is a target? Like broadband for all and yet another innovation fund, this is not proper government but political mood music. It is the drone of a man trying to keep up his embattled spirits as he contemplates impending defeat.

Jonathan Freedland: This was not quite the announcement Gordon Brown would have wanted to make. His favourite rhetorical flourish is the promise of new money: as chancellor, he organised at least eight budgets around that theme and, he believes, won two elections the same way.

In his Commons statement today, billed as the latest relaunch of his government, he announced plenty of what he called "additional investment", whether in education or housing. The trouble is, just hours before the prime minister addressed the Commons, sources close to the Treasury were keen to stress that this was not really new money – but rather a reallocation of existing resources, whether from one government department to another or within departments.

You can see why the Treasury is so eager to make that clear. They fear the markets would be spooked by a further spending splurge given the gargantuan size of public borrowing, with a deficit on course to reach at least £175bn this year. If the markets panic that borrowing is out of control, that could kill off any chance of an early recovery – which is why Alistair Darling would prefer to project a public image of governmental parsimony, at least for now. If that does the trick, and things get better, then that could leave some extra leeway for spending – perhaps even in time for the next general election. But it won't happen if the government starts splashing out now.

Which is why Darling, backed it seems by Peter Mandelson, held back a prime minister who would have preferred to have started flashing his chequebook. That's a division between the logic of politics and economics – and also now an emerging fault-line at the top of the government.

Jackie Ashley: Like all good relaunches, this one contains many ingredients that have been served up before. Access to GPs at weekends, a limit on waiting times between referral and treatment and the promise of an NHS dentist are nothing new. What would be novel is the delivery of private provision, if the public sector cannot provide. It's certainly a turnaround from a prime minister who spent the last 10 years opposing Tony Blair's attempts to bring private sector provision into the public sector, and had many Blairites choking on their cornflakes this morning. But the real question, regardless of ideology, is whether Labour can really deliver on these tantalising promises, or is the whole package just more pre-election rhetoric?

Certainly the promises won't come cheap, though ministers insist that money has either been set aside already (in the case of the health service) or is being re-allocated within departments. Just as important is whether the costly promises can work: at present, too many public services are utterly unreponsive. Trying to navigate your way through the health service to find any specialist, let alone the specialist you want, is an unhappy experience. Too often, the patient is met with answerphone messages, blank looks or a straight refusal.

No one in their right minds would vote against this appetising menu of "entitlements". But the voters don't like having the wool pulled over their eyes. They know that these entitlements will come at a cost, when the national purse is already heavily stretched by the credit crunch. As I said yesterday, Labour's desire for a "Labour investment or Tory cuts" election could quickly turn into a debate about lies and truth. As former prime ministers have found with endless relaunches, it is better to promise too little – and deliver it – than promise too much.

Seumas Milne: The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak. Gordon Brown unleashed a barrage of policy announcements, re-announcements, public service entitlements and initiative overload this afternoon in an effort to portray Labour as the party of growth and jobs – and David Cameron's Tories as do-nothing slash-and-burn merchants.

Amid the flammed-up nonsense, there were some welcome moves in the right direction: job guarantees for the young unemployed, a trebling of the budget for new affordable homes and waiting time guarantees for cancer and other NHS patients.

But what is desperately needed is visible action now. The government has been talking about building new social housing and loosening councils' housing finance straitjacket for months. But barely a sod of earth has yet been turned by real construction workers and housebuilding is still at record lows.

Add to that the worry that the new service entitlements look likely to be the trigger for yet more exorbitant health service privatisation under the shopworn banner of public service "reform" – and the message seems to be that, whatever the scale of the crisis, the prime minister still appears unable to break with a New Labour model that isn't delivering the goods.

Martin Kettle: Governments normally set the political agenda. But not lately and not this weakened Labour government. The expenses scandal and the threat to Gordon Brown's leadership have had the government at their mercy for many weeks. Today, with Brown's government relaunching its draft programme and with the publication of Building Britain's Future, Labour's proto-manifesto for the 2010 election, was an attempt to shift the political conversation on to higher ground.

But the exercise is still muddied by Brown's weakened authority and by his extreme reluctance to admit the scale and consequences of the government borrowing that helped to stabilise the financial system over the winter. The prime minister remains doggedly committed to trying to frame the party battle as a contest between "Labour investment" and "Conservative cuts". Other ministers disagree fundamentally with this approach, as, of course, do the Tories.

Brown's attempt to frame politics as a battle between Labour spending and Tory cuts is the dominant political issue of the moment. A careful parsing of his announcement revealed that he no longer has the free hand to depict things as he would prefer. The early reminder that today's measures will "be paid for from the spending allocations in the budget" underscored that there is no new Labour spending. It was not hard to sense Alistair Darling's insistent hand behind these words. But Brown's later comment that he rejects "the view that government should cut investment in a recession" showed the old Brown instinct at work.

All in all this was a sombre relaunch. The plain fact is that Brown is a weaker leader now than he was at the start of the year. And it showed.